The fish are here, so where are you?

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, August 11, 1996

1996-08-11 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO BAY -- Salvation finally came to San Francisco Bay this past week. After months of hopes and defeats, dreams and downfalls, the cosmic tumblers finally aligned.

What happened is that striped bass, halibut, rockfish and lingcod roared into the Bay at the same time, on a feeding frenzy that suddenly, surprisingly provided the best fishing of the year. Despite the Bay's capricious nature, the brown waters of a volatile, wet spring have turned emerald-green, and the fishing has become something you can believe in.

The stripers and halibut appeared last Monday, hordes of them, slurping up a thick and tasty school of anchovies, and it's been magical ever since.

Take the scores of one boat alone, the New Huck Finn out of Emeryville, reported by Capt. Art Roby:

Trips like this are being run on many boats out of all Bay harbors. For the first time in eons, people are excited beyond belief as they board the boats, then after the trip, ecstatic at the results.

There is a real hot spot, almost like a magic button, sitting hidden in the moss at the rock reef off Angel Islamd, near Point Blunt. This is where anchovies are being trapped on both tides, with two different fish under a spell, striped bass on an all-out attack during the incoming tide, halibut on the outgo, with tons of rockfish, lingcod and cabezone at reefs at the mouth of the Golden Gate.

This is where party boats run a controlled drift with the tide, that is, the engine is left running for exact control, while the anglers aboard let their lines down to the reef, using live anchovies or shiner perch for bait. The wait for a bite has not been a long one. The fish have been nibbling, slurping, biting, attacking, tasting, nipping and chomping, everything you can imagine, until eventually they are hooked, and the battle is on.

Nobody knows how long this will last. But it is happening right now, and if you miss out, there is no telling when you will get another chance for anything like it.

Smokers, wake up

Every time a smoker lights a cigarette, he is eventually left with a butt and a decision over what to do it. Well, I'm going to propose to some legislator friends of mine to make it a criminal act with a mandatory $1,000 fine to discard that butt improperly. Finding cigarette butts on trails, in campgrounds, on lake frontage and on the beach has become disgusting for the 83 percent of the population that does not smoke.

The latest is that on the Coastal Cleanup Day, volunteers picked up 204,544 cigarette butts, or 28 percent of the total pieces of refuse collected at 700 beaches and waterways.

"People (make that smokers) do not seem to understand that when they casually throw their cigarette butts on the ground, many wash down our storm drains and eventually flow to the ocean," said Amy Wiens, volunteer coordinator of the Adopt-A-Beach program with the Coastal Commission. "If you do the math, you will find we collected enough cigarette butts that if laid end to end, they would extend 8,500 feet, or roughly the height of Half Dome."

Not only are cigarette butts visual blights on public lands and waters. I have cleaned fish that had cigarette butts in their stomachs, and have talked to mechanics at boat repair shops who say they have had to fix engines that ingested cigarette butts in the cooling water intakes then clogged them.

Notes of note

Honey, what's that noise?: A special show, Rattlers in Our Midst, will be presented at the Lindsay Museum in Walnut Creek on Saturday, Aug. 24, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., where you can meet several snakes (not including any of my ex-friends) and watch them be fed, with several experts and guest speaker Harry Greene of UC Berkeley available. Museum admission is $4.50 for adults, with discounts for seniors and kids. (510) 935-1978.

Better than Star Wars: Nature cruisers to the Farallon Islands reported an extraordinary trip last weekend, spotting five different species of whale - orcas (killer whales), blue whales, humpback, gray and a minke. Whale hot line recording: (415) 474-0488.

One great step: For mankind, that is, and I don't mean walking on the moon, but rather the Salmon Festival hosted by the Yurok Indians on the lower Klamath River. Just 10 years ago, there was tremendous resentment between the Yuroks and vacationers over the salmon, but the Yuroks' efforts to now welcome tourists, rather than fight them, have made the Festival a big step to bridge differences.&lt;